Journalists are usually lucky if they can get big-time businessmen like Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing to talk to them at all. JMSC alum Samantha Wang (BJ 2008), who works as a reporter for the Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper in Hong Kong, got a brief interview with Li in early February – and then received a call back from Hong Kong’s richest man, to make sure she had understood the points he made the first time around.

Anyone who has ties to Hong Kong will find things in the book that he or she can identify with, says Nicole Kwan (MJ 2003) referring to The Dragon and the Crown (HKU Press 2009), the memoirs she co-wrote with her 83-year-old uncle, Stanley Kwan. Why? “Because these are really our collective memories,” she says.

Corporate mergers normally affect the public only indirectly. Dr. Rikkie Yeung’s well-received new book, Moving Millions, published by the Hong Kong University Press, examines a merger that has a direct impact on millions of Hong Kong lives on a daily basis: that of the Mass Transit Railway Corporation and the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation in 2007.